All in the family: Century farms buck consolidation trend

NEWTON — As Margaret Goering watches her husband, Larry, amble across their barnyard in boots, jeans and John Deere ballcap pulled low, she knows he’s right where he wants to be.

“He’s an outdoor farm person,” she said of her husband. “As long as he’s physically able, he’s going to farm.”

“Well,” Larry, 77, said, “you just get it in your blood.”

That’s no exaggeration. Five generations of Goerings have farmed east of Newton in Harvey County, and a sixth is getting ready to take over. 

The Goerings’ property is recognized as a “Century Farm” by the Kansas Farm Bureau, a designation that is awarded to farms of at least 80 acres that have been in the same family at least 100 years. Harvey County has 55 Century Farms, Sedgwick County 53 and Butler County 33.

The first of Larry Goering’s ancestors to settle on the farm was his great-great grandfather, Carl Heinrich Tangeman, who was born in 1821. A blacksmith in Prussia, Tangemen fled the country to avoid being drafted into its army a second time. Intending to join two brothers who were already in New York City, Tangeman instead saw his ship blown so far off course in a storm that it ended up landing in New Orleans. After his wife and two small children died of smallpox, he managed to reunite with his brothers, then moved west to farm in Ohio for 32 years. A cousin of Larry’s found Tangeman’s tale so dramatic that she turned it into two historical novels.

Courtesy photo
Descendants of Carl Heinrich Tangeman, center front, still farm the Harvey County land he acquired in 1879. Tangeman divided it between his nine children.

In 1879, Tangeman sent his eldest son to Kansas looking for cheaper land. That son — Paul George Tangeman — got off the train in Newton and bought 80 acres with his father’s money. The next year, Carl, who had remarried, arrived with his wife and eight remaining children.

“They built the barn first and lived in it a year or two while they built the house,” Goering said. The house stood until tornado damage claimed it in the early 1960s.

Although eldest sons typically inherited their family’s land, Tangeman and his second wife decided to divide theirs equally among their six boys and three girls. Tangeman acquired enough to give all of them 80 acres in the same township section.

Larry Goering is descended from Tangeman’s second son. Goering said none of his siblings were interested in farming, while he knew from a young age that he wanted to. Today, the Goerings and their son, Kevin, own 1,000 acres in the township, renting some of it to other farmers. When he was acquiring land, Goering said, “I was looked at like you are an idiot” for paying $300 per acre. Last year, the average value of Kansas farmland was $2,630 per acre.

The farm has gone through several manifestations through the decades. Goering’s grandfather raised Shetland ponies there for sale to lawyers, bankers and other well-heeled residents of Newton.

“They all wanted ponies for their kids to ride up and down Main Street in Newton,” Goering said.

His parents operated it as a dairy farm, hauling milk cans to the old Steffen Dairy in Wichita. That ended after a tornado took down the silos. When he took over the farm, Goering focused on raising wheat, milo and soybeans. He added hogs to the mix for a few years and raises beef cattle today along with crops.

Unpredictable weather, bad harvests, competition from large growers and fluctuating commodity prices influenced by numerous factors prove a constant challenge.

Or, as Goering puts it, “Figuring out how to make the income match expenses and have a little left over.”

“In the eighties was when a lot of farmers gave up,” he said. “They couldn’t make the payments.” With the price of land today, Larry said, it’s impossible for somebody to buy land solely with income from a farm. Instead, much land is owned by investor landlords who lease it to farmers, most of whom have other jobs for health insurance and additional income.

Larry taught vocational agriculture for 38 years at high schools in Marion, Moundridge and Newton, often hiring students to help on the farm. Margaret worked for the Harvey County Health Department after the couple’s children were grown, making home visits and checking on child care operators.

The physical nature of farming — which for the Goerings includes maintaining tractors and combines in their own shop — isn’t seen as a negative. “There were a couple times I came home (from teaching), farmed all night and went back and taught school,” Larry said. “The kids didn’t know I’d been up all night. It didn’t happen much, maybe three times.”

Margaret, who grew up on a farm in northeast Kansas and met her husband at Kansas State University, hauled grain to Newton and helped with other farm chores when their children were young. She even tried her hand on a tractor one year, but after some crop rows came up crooked, she said, “They don’t have me plant wheat anymore.”

“She keeps the books, pays the bills, asks where the next check is coming from,” Larry said. “And feeds people.”

Kevin Goering works as a design engineer for John Deere in southeast Iowa but returns here regularly to help farm. Larry remembers him taking apart a toy tractor as a toddler to see how it worked.

Century Farm such as the Goerings’ are likely to become rarer in the future due to the growth of large-scale farms. Kansas’ most recent agriculture census, completed in 2017, counted 58,569 farms that year, compared to 68,579 in 1987. Over the same period, the number of farms of 2,000 acres or more grew from 5,056 to 6,447. 

Unlike many farm families, however, the Goerings have a plan for keeping their farm in the family for at least another generation: their grandson, 20-year-old Jacob, will eventually take it over when they go to live with a daughter near Hillsboro.

Jacob, asked when he knew he wanted to farm, shrugged and said, “It’s all I ever wanted to do.”

Margaret notes with pride that Jacob’s sisters can operate a tractor and combine and that Jacob “knows how to run everything on this farm.”

“It’s a great place to raise kids,” Margaret said of the farm. “They learn responsibility. They have chores, and they learn to appreciate life.” 

List of all Century Farms in Butler, Sedgwick and Harvey counties.

 The Kansas Farm Bureau is accepting applications for its 2023 Century Farm program. Details for qualification and applications are available at county Farm Bureau offices and at www.kfb.org/centuryfarm.